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Week 2 – Complete

Week 2 is finished.

This week I had laid out huge aspiration for a space shooter type game. I ran into some issue like, figuring about how the enemy ships would behave, messing up the HTML deployment, and not leaving enough time to playtest.

So, this week, there is only a download link and an Android Play Store link.

GOOD : I managed to complete most of my goals i set out for myself. In comparison to last week I think the game itself looks much better. There’s color, there’s music playing, it just feels better. Also, I wasn’t afraid to cut ideas that weren’t going to make it in before the deadline.

BAD : During this week I realized I would’ve been better served scheduling my time out into blocks (in this block of time I work on just this and when that time is up I stop). Similar to how I’m doing one game a week, I could utilize that same process for one block of time a feature. Because I would shift my focus around the project when I worked I feel I lost time and ended up with a bunch of things that were somewhat done instead of three or four things that were done. Also, when planning this week I never left time for playtesting my game before deployment. When the deadline was getting close I was exhausted and realized that I was going to put something out that didn’t deploy correctly to Android and just wouldn’t compile to HTML. That cause the game to suffer. Buttons are too small on Android and make it awkward to play. Despite the bugs that I failed to have to resolve, I actually thought I would’ve had an acceptable game for this week on Android. But with the button size issue, and having left myself no time to fix it, I did what I had to do: make the deadline and I released an inferior product.

And it hurts.

LESSONS LEARNED : Scheduling goes hand-in-hand with planning. Plan for things to go wrong. Plan to playtest. UI is a lot more important than I was giving it credit for, if a player can’t reasonably interact with the game then they aren’t going to play it. Parallax backgrounds are fun and easy.